Articles and Resources

QUOTE: If the NSA sabotaged a secure random number generator in a widely used commercial library, it used an extremely blunt instrument....There’s far more at stake here than NSA’s reputation or RSA’s and other U.S. business interests, however. We urgently need NSA and RSA to come clean with the public so we can begin to unravel the damage that’s been done to the basic mechanisms of trust in our online world.

QUOTE: what’s really on trial here is the role played in the settlement by Bank of New York Mellon, the trustee charged with protecting all investors in these securities. Trustees for asset-backed securities have a duty to ensure that the companies administering them, known as servicers, do right by the investors who own them. But testimony in the case, known as an Article 77 proceeding, indicates that during months of settlement talks, Bank of New York Mellon did not do all it could to ensure that all investors holding the Countrywide securities got the best deal possible from Bank of America.

QUOTE: Clearly, there is a moral principle at work in the actions of the leakers, whistle-blowers and hacktivists and those who support them. I would also argue that that moral principle has been clearly articulated, and it may just save us from a dystopian future.
In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” one of the most poignant and important works of 20th-century philosophy, Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.” One interpretation of this holds that it was not an observation about what a regular guy Adolph Eichmann seemed to be, but rather a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system....A good illustration of this phenomenon appears in “Moral Mazes,” a book by the sociologist Robert Jackall that explored the ethics of decision making within several corporate bureaucracies.

QUOTE: In my upcoming book "Present Shock," I chronicle some of what happens when we can no longer manage our many online presences. I have always argued for engaging with technology as conscious human beings and dispensing with technologies that take that agency away. Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we're not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and worse misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others.

QUOTE: With Goldman Sachs on the job, the corporate takeover of Dragon Systems in an all-stock deal went terribly wrong. Goldman collected millions of dollars in fees — and the Bakers lost everything when Lernout & Hauspie was revealed to be a spectacular fraud.

QUOTE: the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

QUOTE: '"Although defendants testified before Congress and elsewhere that they have 'zero tolerance' for rape and sexual assault, their conduct and the facts demonstrate the opposite: They have a high tolerance for sexual predators in their ranks, and 'zero tolerance' for those who report rape, sexual assault and harassment," according to the lawsuit...'

QUOTE: It is certainly true that when you extend credit, you take some risk that you will not get paid. But Mr. Benjamin seems to be saying that it is all the creditor’s fault and the debtor bears no responsibility. That just might be the grand daddy of entitlements. Is he saying that if you go into business, you are entitled to stick your creditors if they are stupid enough to continue to give you credit even when you might be in trouble?

QUOTE: European leaders, in a significant step toward resolving the euro zone financial crisis, early Thursday morning obtained an agreement from banks to take a 50 percent loss on the face value of their Greek debt.

QUOTE: as our economy fitfully heals, it would be prudent to ask whether lawyers and accountants offer the same protection against corporate misconduct that they once did. Three or four decades ago, investors and regulators could rely on these professionals to provide a check on corporate risk-taking. But over time, attorneys and auditors came to see their practices not as independent firms that strengthen the integrity of capitalism, but as businesses measured chiefly by the earnings of their partners.

QUOTE: Unlike Bernie Madoff's multi billion dollar scam -- which targeted many wealthy investors -- this smaller-scale fraud has stolen lifelines from retirees of modest means… "People losing their retirement money puts them in a much more serious position, with some of the victims in this case actually having to go back to work -- in addition to losing their homes and money."

QUOTE: A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

QUOTE: "Data pass" refers to a shady practice of sending credit card information along to a third party at the end of a transaction without the buyer's explicit approval. In years past, travelers often found themselves unwittingly enrolled in clubs that automatically charged a monthly enrollment fee while travel companies raked in millions in profits, according to investigators and consumers.

QUOTE: “The government is finally onto the notion that they have to start asking questions about Google,” he said. “Google started off saying they were going to treat everything on the Web neutrally. That is the basis on which they secured dominance. And now they’ve changed the rules.”

QUOTE: “I think cynical people are extraordinarily gullible,” said Stephen Greenspan, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of “Annals of Gullibility” (Praeger, 2008). “They are gullible to ideas that reinforce their point of view.”

QUOTE: Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings [taken by local environmental officials--Ed.] will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of an oil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its biggest clients.

QUOTE: Seven years ago, the Havasupai Indians, who live amid the turquoise waterfalls and red cliffs miles deep in the Grand Canyon, issued a “banishment order” to keep Arizona State University employees from setting foot on their reservation — an ancient punishment for what they regarded as a genetic-era betrayal....their blood samples had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and theories of the tribe’s geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories.

QUOTE: ...Lawrence Salander, a top Manhattan art dealer who ran the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, admitted to stealing more than $120 million from clients, often by simply not paying them the full amount for art he sold on their behalf. Remarkably, he acknowledged that he had sustained the fraud for more than a decade before he was caught.

QUOTE: Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone...Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape.

QUOTE: Do you know when you're being hustled by bankers, mortgage brokers, and investment peddlers? Check out our tip sheet on financial pros' everyday deceptions—and how to protect yourself against them

QUOTE: Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

QUOTE: Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, feels that the real culture war in America today is not about gay marriage or abortion, divisive though those issues are, but about capitalism.

QUOTE: as the number of people genotyped grows, data sharing might be able to increase the statistical power of these experiments. But researchers are now cautioning that sharing the data might allow someone to learn about the people who contribute DNA samples to these studies.

QUOTE: Workers don't care so much about whether their employers deliver on specific promises, according to the latest research in organisational psychology. What matters most are the rewards and opportunities they end up getting...

QUOTE: Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.

QUOTE: Historians, literary detectives and even courts of law rely on methods that identify the author of a text by their writing style. But a new study suggests that some of these so-called stylometry techniques are easily fooled...

QUOTE: some researchers have now looked into whether it's possible to fake a valid DNA sample, and they have come up with a disturbing answer: just about any molecular biology lab has the tools to do so.

QUOTE: Here is a Jew accused of cheating Jewish organizations trying to help other Jews, they say, and of betraying the trust of Jews and violating the basic tenets of Jewish law. A Jew, they say, who seemed to exemplify the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the thieving Jewish banker....In addition to theft, the Torah discusses another kind of stealing, geneivat da’at, the Hebrew term for deception or stealing someone’s mind. “In the rabbinic mind-set, he’s guilty of two sins: one is theft, and the other is deception,” said Burton L. Visotzky, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

QUOTE: Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours. In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size.

QUOTE: whatever else Mr. Madoff’s game was, it was certainly this: The first worldwide Ponzi scheme — a fraud that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any similar scheme in history, entirely eclipsing the puny regional ambitions of Charles Ponzi, the Boston swindler who gave his name to the scheme nearly a century ago.

QUOTE: Almost no segment of New York City’s real estate industry was spared in the Madoff scandal, which may be history’s largest Ponzi scheme....Mr. Madoff (pronounced MAY-doff) managed his funds much the way that real estate leaders have operated successfully for decades: He provided little information and demanded a lot of trust.

QUOTE: Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.

QUOTE: Wal-Mart has decided to keep the music that it sold wrapped in a layer of copyright protection playable, following a flurry of customer complaints about legally purchased music becoming unplayable.

QUOTE: A study by the Federation of State Physician Health Programs found about one percent of all physicians practicing in the United States are in confidential treatment....Five audits since 1982 found a string of failures. In some cases physicians appointed people who work for them as their monitors. In other cases doctors could easily know in advance when a "random" drug test was going to take place.

QUOTE: Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reported a year ago that the FBI used such letters ...to improperly obtain telephone logs, banking records and other personal records of thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005. An internal FBI audit also found that the bureau potentially violated laws or agency rules more than 1,000 times in such cases.

QUOTE: be seen in a timely manner....test results in a timely manner...Your doctor -- not the staff -- should call you with bad results....Your doctor should tell you what medicines you're getting and their side effects....Your doctor should explain everything in terms you can understand

QUOTE: ...[a] Georgetown couple is convinced that their names are not being removed from the city's child protection registry largely because of the District's embarrassment over the Jacks case. The parents believe the city was right to suspect abuse, right to investigate, right to run tests. But they say the case went off the rails when city lawyers continued to press abuse allegations even after the judge found no cause to proceed.

QUOTE: In a relationship built on trust [between real estate agents and homeowners], where promises are rarely written down and where [in some cases] there is no signed contract, what are the exact obligations of these representatives in guiding their clients through a sizzling market?

QUOTE: ...a critic of the settlement [between Merck and lawyers of various plantiffs who claim Vioxx caused their heart attacks and strokes], said that the deal ran afoul of a fundamental ethics rule prohibiting lawyers from promising not to handle certain cases in exchange for settlement money.

QUOTE: Before cell phones, laptops and Sidekicks -- a BlackBerry-like device for the younger, hipper crowd -- someone might have noticed that a teacher was "grooming" a child, or being way too attentive, too often. Not anymore. Now, teachers have weeks, months and years to secretly undermine a child's parents and get a student to go along with sexual contact.

QUOTE: Under the banner of "intellectual property," record labels warn you not to bootleg their songs. Hollywood studios warn you not to download their movies. Intellectual property has lately seemed the concern of corporations trying to protect the artist from the grabby public. But in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it's the big boys who get grabby.

QUOTE: discourage people from cooperating with the investigation of crimes — crimes committed against their own homes, their own neighbors, their own children....based on more than just fear of gang retaliation. It is also a consequence of their deep distrust of the local police and prosecutors and politicians.

QUOTE: But church groups and other nonprofits worry that this probe could lead Congress to pass laws that slip into constitutionally protected territory – imposing excessive government oversight on a wide range of churches and other nonprofits.